**Secret 4. Time is Money**

It costs energy to stay alive. Human energy is called money. Money powers human work. The longer it takes to do the work of gathering money, the more money it costs to gather it. There are many ways to optimize this game.

Practical Examples

I’ve owned and operated twenty five businesses over the last forty years. This taught me about human behavior, potential money, kinetic money, and optimizing processes to minimize time between each step. In the seventeen businesses I own now, I’m keenly aware that time costs money.

Business Visualization

I visualize businesses in scale models that show me the value of the money flowing through each stage of the business, the processes that move the money, and the performance of the people doing the work at each step. Visualizing businesses in this way has enabled me to identify opportunities for many improvements in quality, performance, and efficiency. This page describes some of the models I’ve used to optimize businesses and the results of these optimizations.

This is a scale model of a business system. The money is on the left, the processes are on the right, and the performance of the people doing the work at each step of every process is at the bottom.

Visualizing Energy Transfer

I learned to visualize energy transfer in 1980 by doing experiments with light, color, vibrations, and marbles and ramp s. This is when I learned that mass in motion was energy. I visualize the transfer of energy using scale models that show me the position, velocity, acceleration, momentum, and friction in the system at snapshots in time.

In 1985, I understood that money is energy and that it follows the same rules. In a business system, potential money is converted into kinetic money through work. Since money is energy and energy transfer costs time, time costs money.

A business is simply a machine that moves money through human work.

This is a heat engine. The energy in the fuel was stored in atoms in the sun a few years ago. The energy in the food you ate today was stored in the sun a few weeks ago. You traded money for that solar energy. You did work to trade for the money that you traded for solar energy. All living things play this invisible game.

Over the years, I built a few different versions of software to create the dynamic models of the business optimization and visualization engine that I’m using now. The size of the spinning gears is measured in "dollars,” and the speed of the gears is measured in "dollars-per-hour.” This software makes the gears that represent the money spin faster by optimizing the sales funnel and visualizing all of the processes that move the potential money through the system.

The Balance of Decisions

Incentive plans are designed to maximize the income-velocity inside the business by aligning key-performance-indicators related to “time and money” with compensation plans. This inspires and motivates people to work faster and with higher efficiency.

Business optimization results in increases in the size of the gears (the value of the money) and the speed of the gears (the income velocity in terms of dollars-per-hour). Business systems have the energy property called “momentum” and this visualization shows the conservation of momentum as money flows through the system. I built an optimization engine that uses energy transfer principles to create money.

I built software called Cloudminer that mines wasted money stored in the future (on the sales funnel). This wasted money is evaporating in the future, just like water evaporating off the top of a reservoir.

Since January 1, 2022, this tool has created over $1 mill that would have evaporated if Cloudminer wasn’t created. Cloudminer increases the momentum of the energy in the business. This reduces the future cancellation rate and creates money.

The faster the potential money is converted into actual money, the less money is lost the the habitat (energy competition). Similarly. the faster the bees go to the flowers to gather the sugar, the less time the competing bees have to gather the resource. The faster I gather money from future customers, the less money my competitors gather.

Energy transfer costs time. Time is honey. Time is money. Time is energy. Increasing income velocity increases business momentum.

This energy transfer system can be visualized in a scale model.